From JS HARGRAVE-WRIGHT
I found your ‘Mad as a catter’ diatribe extremely irritating (Comment,
19 May). The reason that the ‘populace at large’ gets ‘hysterical’ comes
down to one simple factor: trust. As a member of that ‘populace at large’,
I do not feel that the government has my best interests at heart. It will
happily let me die (as long as I am statistically insignificant) as long
as it keeps the abattoirs of farming industrious.
This lack of trust, unfortunately, applies also to scientists, which
is a sad indication of a change of attitude in the past decade. I listen
with increasing apprehension to scientists publicly denigrating each other’s
theories and results. This applies to many things relevant to personal survival,
from the greenhouse effect to this, the latest food scare: whether bovine
spongiform encephalopathy can, or has been, passed to our food chain.
As members of this unfortunate mass we have to trust our pessimism,
for to whom else can we turn?
JS Hargrave-Wright Barnstaple Devon
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